11 Best New Fitness Tech Gadgets

Boot up your fitness efforts with these high-tech, useful health- and workout-tracking gizmos

FitBit

The Flex wristband is the latest gizmo from FitBit.

This is the quantified life. It's time to measure your workouts, your meals, your resting heart rate, your body mass index… heck, even your sleep! No, seriously. If you start to collect—and pay attention to—the data, it will make you a healthier person in the end. Here's how.

Gone are the days of logging your workouts in a tattered notebook with pen and—gasp!—paper. In this day and age, smart exercisers are measuring their workouts with high-tech devices that record important stats—heart rate, speed, intensity, distance traveled—and upload them directly to a computer or smartphone for easy analysis. It's sort of like having your workouts tested and analyzed in a sports lab, your body wired to sensors while you struggle on the treadmill or stationary bike, only more comfortable. With that information in-hand, it's easier to tweak your workouts and set manageable goals, thus bringing effective exercise within reach, sans private trainer.

The same goes for day-to-day health. Why guess at how your poor sleep is affecting your heart health, when there's a 24-hour wristwatch monitor that can track both and plot the correlations, plus help you form healthier habits along the way? You could keep overeating, or you could get a fork that helps you slow down your meals, allowing your body to feel satiated before you put away too much food. You could step onto the scale each day and wring your hands, or you could use a scale that measures weight, body mass index and body fat percentage, and shoots it all wirelessly to your computer, where you can better understand the trends in your day-to-day fluxuations. Welcome to the future of fitness.